Alemania
Time Travellers
Jesse Simon
The final collaboration between Strauss and
von Hofmannsthal was also, in some ways, their least consequential: if Arabella is unquestionably a cut above
the average domestic entertainment, it is also ultimately a tidily conceived
tale of true love overcoming human foibles, set against the comfortably
nostalgic backdrop of 1860s Vienna. While the excellent new production at the
Deutsche Oper couldn’t quite elevate the low key drama of the libretto to the
level of mythic universality that Strauss and von Hofmannsthal’s best work
achieves so effortlessly, it nonetheless made a strong argument that, beneath
the opera’s period details and comedic misunderstandings are elements that may seem
all the more relevant in the twenty-first century.
Director Tobias Kratzer used the stated
setting of the opera as his starting point, and the first act unfolded against
the backdrop of a meticulously recreated Viennese hotel. The only intrusion of
the modern world was a camera crew of three who, despite being on stage and
amidst the characters, were so inobtrusive that they could not possibly have
belonged to the same reality as the action. Indeed, their footage was broadcast
live (in black and white) onto screens that were pulled down, at various times,
over one half of the set or the other; and while the crew filmed close-ups of
the characters in order to capture actions and expressions that would not have
been visible from the auditorium, they just as often lingered on the elegant
details – bouquets of flowers or pieces of furniture – that gave the setting
its verisimilitude.
Strauss: Arabella. Sir Donald Runnicles, conductor. Tobias Kratzer, director. Deutsche Oper Berlin, March 2023. © 2023 by Thomas Aurin.
It was only in the second act that the
staging escaped from its suffocating period recreation. Although the act opened
in the corridor outside a Viennese ballroom – only when the door was open could
one glimpse the dancers in full swing – the staging became unmoored in time shortly
after the first meeting of Arabella and Mandryka, and in the course of the next
half hour we were taken from the nineteenth century to the iPhone era, with
numerous stops along the way: a group of waltzers disappeared into the ballroom,
and when they re-emerged their ballgowns had been replaced with flapper
dresses; when they appeared again it was in swinging London attire. At some
point a disco ball appeared in the ballroom behind the door and Mandryka’s
servants went from bowler-hatted layabouts to small-time hoods with
slicked-back hair doing lines of coke; after a brief foray into industrial club-culture,
badly-dressed hipsters formed a logical, if unfortunate terminus to the
chronological journey.
Everything about the act was ingeniously
conceived and perfectly executed, but the rush of temporal signifiers
eventually came to eclipse the drama, and one had to wonder if Mr Kratzer was
merely showing off, or if there was some greater argument in mind (beyond the
fact that the modern world represents a nadir of fashion). Yet Mr Kratzer
silenced all doubts in the third act, in which it was revealed that the
temporal world of the action had splintered in two, with the principal stage
action fast-forwarding to the present while the period drama of the first act
had continued in parallel as a black and white film. The schism between film
and stage allowed Mr Kratzer to treat the events of the final act against two
very different sets of social mores; and if the multiple timelines offered only
subtle revisions to the tensions between Arabella and Mandryka, it provided Mr
Kratzer the opportunity to transform the relationship of Zdenka and Matteo from
comedic subplot into an explicitly trans-positive statement (a decision that
provoked vocal outrage from some members of the audience).
Strauss: Arabella. Sir Donald Runnicles, conductor. Tobias Kratzer, director. Deutsche Oper Berlin, March 2023. © 2023 by Thomas Aurin.
Between its intelligent engagement with
up-to-the-moment issues and the constant dazzle of its conceptual and technical
execution, there was little about the staging that wasn’t conspicuously
brilliant; and yet, at the end of the evening, one was left with the feeling
that the story and music of Arabella had been pressed into service as a
vehicle for certain arguments and theatrical feats with only cursory attention
given to the characters and the drama. Arabella herself remained opaque, a
curious void at the centre of the story. It was almost impossible to discern
her moral outlook in the first act – was she driven by a capricious heart,
cynical detachment or mere indifference? – and even more difficult to draw
a line between the Viennese Arabella of the beginning and the present-day
Arabella of the conclusion. If the chronological shift of the staging allowed
us to understand different facets of the supporting characters, Arabella alone
seemed poorly defined, forgotten amidst the staging’s more pressing arguments.
The staging may have been more interested
in ideas than characters, but the strong, consistently likable cast went a long
way to restoring the balance. If Zdenka emerged as a figure of equal importance
to Arabella it was due in large part to Elena Tsallagova, whose unfailingly
beautiful tone and ability to elucidate the conflicts within the character
yielded a performance of keen intelligence and captivating intensity. For much
of the first act she was the dominant figure – there were few moments in the
evening that could equal her scene with Arabella – and her brief but
arresting appearances in the second and third acts brought a notable increase of
energy to the stage.
Strauss: Arabella. Sir Donald Runnicles, conductor. Tobias Kratzer, director. Deutsche Oper Berlin, March 2023. © 2023 by Thomas Aurin.
Sara Jakubiak’s appearance as Arabella had
been announced only a few days earlier – she was a very late replacement for
the indisposed Gabriela Scherer – but her performance was notable not only for
its wide emotional range but also its total assurance. If she seemed most
invested in the deflated pragmatism of the third act – her cautious
acceptance of Mandryka’s essentially flawed character provided the evening with
one of its few moments of genuine gravitas – she was able to summon hints
of dreamy ecstasy in her solo scene at the conclusion of Act One, and conveyed
an appropriate romantic naïveté during her first meeting with Mandryka.
Russell Braun, as Mandryka, sounded a touch
hesitant in his initial appearance but his performance grew in stature throughout
the evening. His narration to Waldner in the first act was notable primarily
for its thoughtful phrasing, but his declarations to Arabella at the beginning
of the second revealed an appealing immediacy of expression and nobility of
character; during the remainder of the opera he traced a convincing arc from
jealousy to rage to overwhelming guilt. And Robert Watson was ideally suited to
the role of Matteo: his light, lyrical tone combined with the desperate fervour
of his delivery resulted in a sympathetic portrait of a character struggling to
find his correct place within the confusion of the drama.
While Count Elemer is ultimately written
out of the libretto’s intertwining love stories, Thomas Blondelle sketched a
figure of unusual complexity in his few appearances, combining aristocratic poise
and well-crafted ardour into a performance of delightful ambiguity: throughout
his first-act scene with Arabella – another of the evening’s highlights
– one could never be sure if his courtship was born of genuine passion or
simply part of an elaborate game. It was also a pleasure to see Doris Soffel
and Albert Pesendorfer as Adelaide and Count Waldner; the elder Waldners may be
peripheral to the drama, but the two singers brought palpable warmth and authority
to each of their appearances.
Strauss’ interwar operas, some of which
contain passages of exaggerated beauty that seem out of proportion to the
situations they describe, can be problematic for any conductor unwilling to
engage with them on their own terms, and throughout the evening one could sense
a reticence in the musical direction of Sir Donald Runnicles. Although he had
no problem highlighting the illustrative passages that push the drama forward
and give the opera its basic form, he did not always seem as comfortable
indulging in the high-gloss opulence on which Strauss’ later music so often
thrives. The result was a performance that felt oddly low-key, never lacking in
motivation or discipline, but rarely acknowledging the potential for
transcendence that lay in the work’s most highly-charged moments. He need not
have been so cautious: between the generous charm of the vocal performances and
the constant invention of Mr Kratzer’s staging, there was little chance of this
Arabella tipping over into mere melodrama.
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